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The Underground Thomist

Another Sort of Heresy

Submitted by jbudziszewski on Sat, 10/18/2014 - 00:00

Harvard anthropologist David Pilbeam, reviewing a book about human origins: “My reservations concern not so much this book but the whole subject and methodology of paleoanthropology. But introductory books – or book reviews – are hardly the place to argue that perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; that our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories. Rather, the theories are more statements about us and ideology than about the past. Paleoanthropology reveals more about how humans view themselves than it does about how humans came about. But that is heresy.” -- American Scientist 66 (May-June, 1978), pp. 378-379.